


Ghost Note Symphony

by GoldenThreads



Series: Copernican Revolt [2]
Category: New Mutants (Comics), X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Comes Back Wrong, Deaf Character, F/F, Family Feels, Fix-It of Sorts, Kid Fic, M/M, Multi, Returning Home, Slow Burn, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2020-06-28 09:00:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19809025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldenThreads/pseuds/GoldenThreads
Summary: After finally clawing their family back together, the New Mutants settle in for a happily ever after. They really should know better by now.Tabby and Jono certainly do.Or: the New Mutants attend a reverse wake, 8 years too late. It's awkward for everyone.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheStemCell](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheStemCell/gifts).



> Zombie Dad: A Big Gay New Mutant Family Adventure, about finding your way in from the cold and refusing to make do after that. Continues directly from Copernican Revolt, wherein they lost a baby, found a baby, and are now trapped with a Technarch rebellion on their hands.

Mission, wrap. After four months of frustration, the New Mutants had finally won the holy grail—Leeland, their teleporting toddler—and even scooped Warlock and Doug back into the fold along the way. Back together at last, and it felt so.

Weird.

They’d all wandered back inside the Ramsey house after the evening’s dramatics outside. Roberto immediately flopped into the comfiest chair of them all, kicking up his tired feet before turning an eye back to the team. The comfiest chair, he’d often found, was also the one most well-placed for observation. He wasn’t surprised that it was the same way in a lawyer’s home.

The stragglers appeared in mismatched groups. Xi’an and Tabby were quick walkers by nature, but their attention was entirely elsewhere tonight. Xi’an distantly orbited Dani and her still-wounded arm, strapped to her chest with a makeshift sling; they’d been unable to set it properly and the field medic wouldn’t fly out until at least tomorrow. As always, she worried more about Dani than Dani did herself, but didn’t voice a word of it.

Tabby immediately veered over to Roberto’s chair and hopped up onto the armrest, dropping her feet into his lap so she could angle herself towards Sam and his big moody face. Roberto gave her ankle a squeeze in solidarity.

Kitty stormed in alone and planted herself by the window, staring out into the dark.

Finally, Sam and Dani escorted in the prisoners. There was no other way to describe the stiff, tired looks on their faces, the stress in their wary postures; they were prison guards.

The prisoners in question were a tiny, barely conscious lump with plump cheeks and a mop of golden hair, and the Apocalypse Lite holding onto the baby like a lifeline. Roberto had never seen much of Jono Starsmore – vetted him once on back channels when he showed interest in Sam’s sweet little sis, sure, but that was different from standing inside the cloud of his darkly brooding atmosphere. It made sense when he had half a face. How the man could manage the same air of misery, exhaustion, and contempt for the world with a face the color of mashed blueberries and sweet summer skies, however, was a mystery for the ages.

If you marched Roberto _anywhere_ with Sam and Dani looking Like That, he’d have had his tail between his legs within three steps. Jono wasn’t cowed. Once they’d all gathered and nobody said anything, he adjusted his grip on the toddler and leveled a withering gaze on the New Mutants. “Right. You each get one hug and kiss with the baby, and then the rabbit and I are going to sleep.”

“But—”

“My guitar is fucked. My leg is fucked,” Jono snapped. “This entire situation is fucked. Try again in the morning.”

“That’s fine.” Sam capitulated at once. For all his gruff bluster, the only thing keeping him on his feet was the idea of finally holding his kid again. A moment’s quick cuddle was all it took to make the man who never backed down from a fight give in.

Jono passed him the sleeping Leeland and disappeared into the kitchen.

“Did you bring the crib?” Dani asked quietly, bowing her head to Xi’an’s ear.

“We’ll get it tomorrow. He’s been through enough upheaval for one day.” Xi’an’s voice was equally soft outside an air of finality. Though she always took input and advice, no one could outrank her when it came to parenting choices. Dani didn’t try now.

Sam’s eyes shone liquid-bright when he finally passed the baby on to Roberto and Tabby, and he turned away in a rush. Roberto’s heart thudded in his chest. Still, _still,_ Sam wouldn’t look at them when they had Leeland coddled between them, like it was a picture he had no place in.

Kitty didn’t bother to hold the child. He was sleeping and it wasn’t like she knew him. Instead, she stood by the bay windows and watched out through the curtains, waiting on an arriving gleam of starlight. Nothing came. Somewhere out in the dark, Warlock still sat with Doug cradled protectively against his chest, the rest of the world sealed out. It was one thing to hoard a baby for doting kisses and quite another to steal away with a boy whose face you wore like your own.

After soft words and softer kisses, they passed Leeland back to Sam’s waiting arms, and he reluctantly carried the boy into the kitchen. It was a promise he didn’t want to keep, but couldn’t in good faith break. None of them had their footing yet – even Warlock couldn’t have summoned up a leg to stand on.

“Ma’am.” Sam came to a halt in the doorway and slumped his shoulders forward in a deferential nod to Doug’s mother. With his hands full of baby, there wasn’t much else he could do, and there was nothing at all to say.

Sheila didn’t even look at him. She picked up Jono’s empty mug of tea. “I’ll bring another up in a bit. Third floor, last door on the right.” With that, she turned her back on everyone and paid all her attention to the kettle instead.

Sam knew a dismissal when he saw one. He offloaded the baby into Jono’s lap and walked stiffly back into the living room.

It was a big house. Three times larger than the Guthrie family home, it was excessive for a one-child family and achingly empty for a single woman to live in alone. Sam had never spent much time thinking about it. Wouldn’t have changed anything if he had.

They poked around upstairs, tiptoeing around Magneto’s lingering ghost. He’d disappeared from the field earlier, but they weren’t certain he was really gone until they heard his car roll out of the driveway. They also couldn’t figure out which room he’d occupied for the life of them. Roll of the dice – sleep in Magneto’s bed and never know.

Outside the No-Go zone of Doug’s old bedroom, the New Mutants had a spread of cushy guest bedrooms to choose from. Sam retreated in silence to the only open room on the third floor, conveniently next to Leeland’s. The girls paired off with practiced ease and left Roberto alone with the last free room.

In Roberto’s defense, he simply took the remaining room. He didn’t know it was the one with the creepy bay window overlooking the valley, where the hills had lit up with fireflies like a scene out of a Ghibli movie. 

The bed faced the window. He closed the blinds. It didn’t help.

He lay on the bed and stared at the muted light show in the distance.

Yeah, no.

Roberto tiptoed back into the dark hallway, pressing himself against the wall like an intruder in enemy territory. Footsteps here and there, the creaking of the stairs, some of it familiar and some of it not. He could tell what was Tabby rushing to claim first shower and what was Sam pacing with post-mission restlessness, but the soft clink of dishes downstairs was harder to judge. 

He’d only ever met Sheila Ramsey once, at the funeral. His own mother had visited the Xavier school as often as the team had visited her in Brazil, and Sam’s mother hosted them for practically every holiday. Moira had been a second mother to all of them. Years later, they had still served as a lowkey PTA of sorts, keeping in touch to keep tabs on their raucous, runaway teens. 

Sheila had been left out. It was like Doug had disowned himself the minute he moved in with the New Mutants and never bothered to clue his parents in. A hot potato he chucked at the team like a grenade when he threw himself in front of that bullet. 

Shrapnel, all of it. Roberto’s fingers curled into a fist.

The whole flight, listening to everyone’s whispered worries and frantic plans, he’d thought only of Juliana. Of her hair between his fingers. Her blood on his shirt. Of her back as he let her walk away. 

He wondered if Warlock had prepared himself to do the same.

Funerals were always shit. He remembered how Juliana had looked in the casket, peaceful and empty. Individual moments, images fused into each other like stained glass. Doug’s casket. Illyana’s too small one. A nightmare of burning wood, the empty box that almost held Amara. Sam’s blastfield devouring him whole.

One time, Roberto’s mother had told him that no one was supposed to go through these things, not so many so soon. He’d stopped calling her when things went to shit, after that. Comfort was worse. Mrs. Ramsey would probably agree.

The floorboards groaned softly under his feet as he crept up the stairwell instead of down. They’d never been friends, he had to remind himself again and again. Doug and him had each other’s backs, sure, but put them in the same room and a riot broke out. There was no reason for him to feel like this. They weren’t friends. He wanted to be, now.

Roberto had just reached the door when a hiss came from down the hall.

“Booty call? _Really?”_ Tabby whispered from the stairway.

Taking a deep breath to steady himself, Berto forced a laugh. “Babe, you know Sam can’t even get it up when he’s worried about the baby.”

He pushed into the empty room, leaving the door ajar behind him. It was the same size as the other bedrooms, yet had been converted into a mishmash of a den and a study: a long desk to one side, family photos and awards lining the walls, a blatantly unorganized bookcase, and a pull-out couch and TV. All the posters and action figures were long, long gone.

“Berto.” Tabby’s tone said _we’re not supposed to be in here,_ but they were both too old for that to do any good. She nudged the door shut behind her, quiet as she could.

Blithely ignoring her, Roberto threw himself down on the couch to test its bounce. “Just like college! Sneaking around, fooling around—”

“We didn’t _go_ to college, dumbass.” Tabby pushed his legs off the couch so she could sit, and in an instant he’d sprung up to throw an arm around her shoulders. She leaned into it, playing along.

“Uh, hello? Cable’s Community College? Jimmy majored in pecs and Rictor flunked out of Homoerotic Gazes of Hidden Longing 101?”

Tabby had to press a hand over her mouth to cover her giggles. “Right. Just like college. So let me guess, you want to fool around in the haunted room?”

He had the gall to look caught out and offended all at once. “How is it haunted when he’s alive again?”

She flashed a timebomb under her chin so her face flickered in the light. “Haunted by the ghost of the stick up his ass.”

Roberto beamed. “Good, you’ve got him pegged from the get-go.” 

Tabby choked, burying her face in his shoulder.

“And that’s _exactly_ why we should fool around in the haunted room.”

_“Berto.”_

“I’m serious!”

“You’re never serious. Besides, I thought you were gonna be pals with him this time around. Make up for childhood misdeeds, that kinda shit.” 

“I am!”

“And that starts with fucking around in his old room?”

_“Listen.”_

“Oh, no, I get it – you’re jealous that Warlock isn’t tenderly caressing you under the stars.”

“Like you aren’t!”

Tabby paused and took stock. For one, Warlock had been lax in his friendship duties to them for a while now. There was also Sam’s belligerently bad mood. And most importantly, Roberto’s leg was jittering anxiously where it pressed up against hers. 

She leaned in, trailing a finger along the cut of his jaw. The beard had, thankfully, met its demise during the flight to New York. For a moment, she considered whispering something filthy in his ear, but the way he leaned into the touch broke her heart. Roberto was always the one assuring them that everything would turn out okay. Now he was the one who needed it.

Here one moment and gone the next, Tabby pulled out of his reach and started to rummage through the desk. “Wonder what haunted shit is still lying around. Do you think his mom found his Playboys?”

“As if he had any!”

“I thought the clever boys read it for the articles.”

“They do! We do!” Roberto wrapped his arms around her waist, pressing his face into the gentle slope of her neck. “We learn all the good tricks there.”

“And here I thought you were an innovator.”

“I should be writing the articles,” he agreed solemnly. “I should start a blog.”

Tabby let him spin a wild plan against her warm skin, never pulling away from his embrace, just giving a hum of approval now and then, a chuckle when he waited a beat for her reaction. She inspected every drawer with absentminded intensity, shuffling legal papers and thumbing through a pile of old polaroids. It was clearly a work desk, not a secret hoard of family memorabilia, but she needed to give Roberto enough time to talk his way through his glum heart.

“Top five one-liners,” she prompted when he ran out of steam.

“Babe, I could give a top twenty from just one look at you.”

“Is that number one or number twenty? Needs some—”

A floorboard creaked in the hall outside. They froze. Sam would never let them hear the end of it if he caught them having a secret fake tryst in the Ramsey house. 

Soft footsteps passed to the end of the hall. 

_Jono?,_ Roberto signed when Tabby turned to glance at him.

Before she could answer, they heard a woman’s voice in the hallway. Then the steps continued back the way they came, passing by the doorway once more. 

Stopping in front of the doorway.

Tabby made a break for the closet like it was a million dollar gift card on Black Friday, jamming her elbow into Roberto’s gut as she hurled herself to safety. It wasn’t a sinking ship with limited lifeboats, women and children first, but it sure felt like it as Roberto wheezed air back into his lungs. He dove behind the couch just as Sheila opened the door to her son’s old room.

Roberto didn’t dare breathe. He bit his tongue and listened, waiting for Sheila’s next move, and she lingered there for so long that he started to think they’d been caught. It was a thing mothers did, back you into a corner and wait for you to sheepishly apologize. Then he heard the fault in her breathing, the first shaky hiccup of tears spun out of control. This wasn’t a hostess harrying some mischievous guests, this was a woman standing in her ex-dead son’s room on the verge of a breakdown. Desperate, he tried to flag Tabby down through the cracked door.

This time she took pity on him. She signaled a simple diversion with martial severity and, once he nodded his understanding, rolled the smallest of timebombs past Sheila’s feet and out into the hallway. When it cracked, a single pop like the breaking of furniture, Sheila turned her back just long enough for Roberto to scramble to the dark safety of the closet.

Tabby silently pulled the closet door shut behind them; hiding from parents was old hat, for her. She pressed a finger to her lips and dropped her free hand to her knee, a few sparks flickering weakly in her open palm. Her bombs were always loud, crashing diversions – Roberto hadn’t even realized she could make such soft, guttering flickers, like the dying gasps of a candle wick that had burned down too low. 

They waited much longer than the Seven Minutes in Heaven that Roberto kept signing, finger-spelling the words to her in the weak darkness. When she didn’t crack a smile, he spelled it all out again. Yes, she got the joke, thank you. She was too busy listening for footsteps at the moment. 

After a while, she heard Sheila stop rummaging around and walk out of the room. Roberto reached for the door handle, then fell back with a small _oof_ as Tabby pushed him back out of the way. A suitcase toppled down on him, rustling some of the storage boxes nearby. 

_Useless,_ Tabby thought to herself. She cracked the closet door carefully. Although Sheila was gone, the door to the room itself was still open. The couch had been transformed into a pull-out bed. All of the paperwork had been removed from the tables and desk as well, as though it were being prepared for a new occupant. Unless Warlock was intending to play selfsoulbed all night long, they’d need to put Doug somewhere and all the bedrooms were now occupied. 

“Coast clear?” asked Roberto.

Tabby closed the door and sat back down. “No. She probs just left for bedding. Give it another few, wait ‘til she’s done.”

He sighed and, with the air of a man who deserved some reward for all his patience, began to rifle through the nearest storage box.

“Be quiet,” Tabby hissed.

 _I am very quiet,_ he signed back with a grin, ending with an overly expressive O-K signal. 

Before Tabby could smother him, the footsteps returned, and sure enough the sound of rustling sheets and blankets followed immediately after. All she could do was watch him make a mess of the closet.

To his credit, he _was_ quiet about it. Too quiet. Halfway through the first box, she watched as regret shuttered his roguish grin. It was just a box of action figures, spaceships, and the occasional Godzilla. Hardly treasured relics. 

Fuck, was he actually crying? She should’ve taken the booty call. 

No wonder Amara had high-tailed it out of there; this was going to be an all-around clusterfuck of gross emotional baggage from start to finish. She’d known that, of course, and still it hadn’t really clicked until that very moment. It wasn’t her dead friend. For the very first time, she’d turned up with a carry-on bag while everyone else had ten tons of checked luggage. 

Tabby turned an ear back to the bedroom, heard enough silence to satisfy her, and looked back to Roberto. “Nice find. Think Leeland would like any of those?” she asked in a low voice, leaning over on her knees. 

“I’m looking for Magnum.” His voice was firm and a thousand miles away. “I made Warlock hide one among his collection one time and I never got it back.”

She made a small noise of encouragement, yet he didn’t follow his train of thought any further. Roberto moved on to the next box, more heartbroken and determined with every old trinket.

“It doesn’t look like his room,” he offered a few awkward minutes later. “Maybe if I put a few things back—”

Tabby reached out and took both of his hands into hers, holding them above the boxes. “Dumbass, if you woke up in a model of your childhood bedroom, you’d freak the fuck out.”

All the determination escaped him like air from an escaped balloon.

“I…guess. But.”

She didn’t let go of his hands.

Roberto took a deep breath and finally tore his eyes away from the boxes. “Sam’s worried Doug will replace him. But it’s the opposite. We don’t have a room for him on Utopia—his _mom_ doesn’t have a room for him anymore. Hell, we don’t even have a room for Warlock.”

That bit, Tabby knew perfectly well. Warlock dozed with her on most nights, when he wasn’t jittery with the stress of finding his family. The thing was, for all their insistence on _New Mutants look after their own,_ they weren’t very good at actually making room for people. They’d rearranged everything for Leeland, yet he was an exception that proved the rule. She’d been a New Mutant, too, and honestly she didn’t know what she dreaded more: Doug being welcomed back into the fold with her still on the outside, or, after everything, Doug being kicked to the curb just like her. 

Not that they didn’t have their reasons for being so insular. For her it was an old wound. For Doug it would be a fresh one. She didn’t know the kid, but she didn’t think he deserved that.

“We didn’t plan for this,” Roberto finished softly, defeated.

Tabby opened her mouth and, immediately, snapped it shut once more. Because all she wanted to do was shove those words back into his mouth and make him eat them. They didn’t _plan_ to have a long-lost teammate return from the dead? As if it were a problem. A burden.

As if Selene’s plans hadn’t flayed them open, each and every one, even when they didn’t face her undead army in the end. Tabby had still joined the tense line of beggars outside Danger’s door, desperate for just a few seconds of video feed, letting her heart indulge in a half minute’s dream of Rusty Collins coming home after everything. Even that paled to what Jimmy had gone through when facing his brother in the flesh on Genosha, a new harrowing carved in his bones. What they wouldn’t have done, every single one of them, to have something _unplanned_ like this happen without it being snatched back at the last second.

If the X-Men didn’t already have a pamphlet about how not to be an ungrateful asshole when your dead friend comes back to life and everyone else’s friends are still dead, then Tabby was about to fucking write one. 

She tasted blood from where she’d bit her lip too hard, shaking the anger from her words like sifting flour. “Make it up as you go. Like, he was fine with Sam’s bare blasting ass turning up at his window one night to invite him to an alien hoedown. The boy can think on his feet.”

The look on Roberto’s face was indescribable.

“Plus we’re goddamn _superheroes,_ Berto. Building a new room will take half as long as Sam took with the Ikea crib. Crissakes, there are multiple technopaths and metal peeps chomping at the bit for a hobby. A room isn’t a problem. Plans aren’t a problem. Emotions are the problem. I’m sure Doug will have a lot of them, too. Deal.”

“You know,” Roberto cut in, his voice high and borderline hysteric. “Maybe you picked up a little too much at Cable’s Community—”

“I’m not telling you to fucking shoot your problems in the head. But whatever shit’s been laying around in your head for the past eight years, get it sorted. Or I swear to god I’m locking all of you fuckers in a room with Magneto for grief counseling.” 

She took a deep, deep breath. “Now can we please get out of here. The coast is clear, I’m tired, and you’ve been crying over a Space Wars ship for twenty minutes.”

_“Star Wars.”_

Tabby pushed to her feet and checked the room once more before throwing open the closet. “Go cry to Sam about it. Literally. Go have a bawling-call and get it out of your systems. Because Warlock doesn’t have time for it, Leeland doesn’t have time for it, and I sure as hell don’t have time for it.”

She headed for the door, then stopped in her tracks. Her lips curled into a wry smile. “Hey, Berto. One more thing. What’s the symbolism behind us bursting out of Doug Ramsey’s closet?”

Berto sputtered. “The _symbolism?”_

“It’s a big word, I know. I learned it in college.”

  


* * *

  


Jono woke to cold toes and butterflies. 

Exhaustion, pain, and the lingering dregs of heartache sat heavy in his bones, but the rest of him bubbled with soda-pop in his veins, a whirring lightness unlike anything he’d ever felt before. If it weren’t for his feet freezing where they’d drifted out of the blanket’s domain, it would’ve been so easy to sink back into that buoyant feeling and let himself float on its current, a butterfly in the wind. He pulled up his legs, trying to shrink back into the bed’s warmth, and kneed something hard as a rock that gave a small yelp. Tiny hands grabbed at his calf.

Jono jerked upright and swallowed back a sharp hiss of pain, his bum leg twisting at a bad angle. 

His little bedmate scrambled out from under the blankets, and Jono’s breath caught in his throat. Leeland’s skin pooled with spilt ink, his clothes tattered as though nibbled by thousands of moths overnight, and his hair had risen into a porcupine’s crown, spindles bent low along the back of his neck. His eyes sat as pools of rich honey, deep and sonorous and marked with too much worry for someone so young. He watched Jono for a moment, then reached out for his leg once more.

 _“No,”_ Jono snapped, pulling away once more. When the boy’s eyes followed him, Jono raised his hands to explain. _Blue Bee fine._

Leeland puffed out his cheeks in disbelief. Sparks of gold danced along his fingers.

Just yesterday, Cy had given all his battery power to Leeland and ended up as a rotting corpse monster. No way in hell was Jono going to let the kid power him. 

_All fixed!_ Jono stretched out his bad leg and twisted the ankle in a full circle to demonstrate. Behind his back, he curled his fingernails into his palm until the half-moon slivers bled, ignoring all other pain. The kid was tenacious; this was all the fight he had left in him at the moment. If Leeland didn’t buy it—

The ink slithered back under the boy’s skin like a splash of paint in rewind. He smiled proudly—he had fixed his Blue Bee!—and crawled into Jono’s lap to give him a morning hug. Jono held him close, flooded with relief and worry in equal measure. The boy was fine. The boy also needed to stop giving him a heart attack.

Most importantly, Jono was nowhere near ready to begin the day’s onslaught of bullshit. 

By the time they made it downstairs, the kitchen table was littered with an entire cupboard’s worth of coffee mugs and dishes. The coffee was gone, the pancakes were gone, the eggs and bacon were long, long gone. With no sign of Sheila and the dishes piling up, Jono guessed she’d made a run for it long before the invaders woke up. It was a big kitchen, and with so many egos crammed into it, the New Mutants more than filled the space.

“You, Librarian.” Jono couldn’t remember her name, but he’d seen her around the school the scant few times he’d visited Xavier’s operation between missions of his own. “Kid’s not gonna make a run for it. Turn off the teleportation jammer. Now.”

Ever since he’d dragged himself out of bed, Leeland had refused to leave Jono’s arms. He wouldn’t stand on the floor even with Jono holding his hand, and for the first time his stuffed rabbit was no comfort at all. It was like they’d cut him off at the knees – for a boy who’d always had a ready escape, it was suffocating, even brutal. He knew he was safe, but only because Jono was with him. The rest of the world was suspect.

The New Mutants traded wary looks.

The Librarian lady left her seat so she could ruffle Leeland’s hair and ask him a question that Jono couldn’t decipher. With a huff, Leeland tucked his face against Jono’s neck and began to cry.  
Or pretend to. Jono didn’t tell them his neck was still dry.

A blonde with messy pigtails hopped off the counter, the only one who hadn’t camped out at Queen Dani’s Round Table of battle planning. She didn’t angle away from Jono when she tapped Leeland on the cheek for his attention, and her hands moved nearly as quick as Cy’s – more limited in vocabulary, maybe, but more practiced too.

_Want to go blow up the rabbit-killer?_

Leeland gasped and nodded gladly.

 _Blue Bee come with?_ Leeland signed back, the first words out of him all morning. 

Pigtails gave a long hmmm as she looked Jono over, not bothering to comment on his flushed cheeks. _Blue Bee looks hungry. Is his —?_

Jono couldn’t make out the last word, which made Leeland purse his lips. After a moment’s thought, the boy scrambled out of Jono’s arms so fast he nearly dropped him. He took Pigtails’ hand and off they went. 

“That was Tabby,” said the guy to Sam’s right, mouth curling into a handsome smirk that announced all too clearly that he was trying to get away with mischief. “Call her Boomer.”

“Whatever.”

With a scowl, Jono turned to the kettle to brew a cup of tea. His shoulders felt too light with no one clinging to them. If he wasn’t Leeland’s safety blanket, then he had no reason to be here, but every time his thoughts slithered down that well-traveled road, he remembered these people had chased Sheila out of house and home. There wasn’t any sign of the inkblot cryptid from last night, either. And no Cy, though it was probably ridiculous to be expecting a boy who’d never existed.

“So how have you—”

“Warlock hasn’t reported—”

Sam and Dani clammed up immediately, though he could feel their eyes on the back of his neck. They couldn’t decide whether to treat him as a combatant or a civilian. He wasn’t really either.

“Will you come to my Halloween party?” blurted the guy from before, Sam’s righthand man.

When Jono turned, he found the man eying him through the photo frame he’d made of his fingers.

“You’ll wig the _fuck_ outta Cable. It’ll be a blast. You in?” At Jono’s blank look, the man began gesturing broadly to his own chest. “You know, Cable, rippling pecs, hundreds of pockets, craves those _Apocalyptic_ situations.”

“…This is Berto,” Sam added weakly.

“Shan,” said the librarian with a wave.

“Right,” said Jono. He poured his cup of tea, raised it in their direction in cheers, and marched himself back upstairs.

  


* * *

  


Tabby had made a promise a long time ago: she would never lie to Leeland. So when she said they’d blow up the teleportation jammer, that was exactly what she meant. Dr. McCoy probably had another one laying around somewhere. It would be fine.

Leeland screamed himself hoarse, inky tears streaming like war paint down his cheeks as he jumped up and down on the scattered remains of the machine. When it cut his foot, the transmode curled around his toes like armored socks. He kicked the offending shard off into the distance with all the power of a professional soccer player.

It was just like the time she tried to show him how to eat watermelon and they accidentally blew up five of them instead. Ah, memories.

When he started to wear himself out, Tabby rolled a few time bombs over by his feet. He looked up, she flashed three fingers, and he frantically began to pile the bombs and the machine guts in one big pile. Three minutes, two, one…and up they all went in a grand show of fireworks, Leeland’s eyes wide and bright with glee.

 _Better?,_ she asked once he tottered back to her. 

Leeland beamed.

_Hungry?_

His grin widened, wild like his father’s. Tabby laughed and tossed him three energy bars that she’d nicked from the Blackbird. 

By the time he hit six months, there was no way to feed him from the fridge without running at least two grocery trips a day. The students on Xi’an and Dani’s teams were sick of being sent on Food Requisition Missions in their free time, so they cobbled together a group science project and invented the LifePlus+ Super Bunny Bars. Leeland had only accepted a handful of flavors, and he scarfed down the ChiliBuns like nothing else. Six or seven of them could feed him for a full 24 hours, or ten on an intensive training day. The Blackbird had a whole crate of them and Tabby always carried a few in her purse.

Leeland shoveled the last one into his mouth and nibbled at his fingers, transmode snapping up the crumbs. 

_You grew!_ Tabby rested her elbow on his head, now straining with the awkward angle. _A giant! I’m scared!_

 _Little Bee not scary._ He giggled and leaned into her. _T-Bee scary. Make rabbit-killer BOOM._

“That was all you,” she laughed to herself. Leeland finally seemed safe and settled, even if she knew it would only last until they got back to the house. The two of them laughing and exploding things together was never in The Schedule, but it was normal, and right now nothing else was.

 _Is Blue Bee scary?,_ asked Tabby.

Leeland shook his head frantically. _Blue Bee has music! And pictures! Blue Bee showed Little Bee rabbits! And, and. Blue Bee tall. Carry Little Bee and see EVERYTHING._

_Wow! You saw rabbits?_

His face lit up at the memory. _No Big Bee. Rabbits and Blue Bee and Little Bee. HUNDRED rabbits. ALL friends._ He hit his hands on his knees, smacking a beat. There was almost a rhythm to it, unlike all the rest of his wild, haphazard noises. _Blue got pictures! Go see? Please? Please T-Bee?_

_Soon, okay?_

_Okay._ Leeland threw himself backwards across her legs, kicking his feet. _Big Bee no see. Monster chase first._

Tabby brushed his bangs back from his forehead. It wasn’t her job to teach him who his parents were. But. _Monster is my friend. He wants to say hello._

Leeland mulled it over for a moment then shrugged. _Okay._

Carefully, with as much cheer and levity in her smile as she could manage, Tabby continued. _Who is Big Bee? I don’t know him._

This time confusion darkened Leeland’s ruddy face. The question didn’t make sense. He patted at his chest like a heartbeat, thump-thump, thump-thump. _Same._

Tabby bit her lip, rolling it between her teeth. They’d raised the boy with a baker’s dozen of moms and dads and aunties; how were they supposed to explain who his real parents were? She’d seen Doug the night before, clinging to his son while fritzed out and half mad, ready to raze the whole world to the ground. And maybe she felt like blowing shit up half the time too, but it was—different.

 _Big Bee belongs to you. Yours._ It was all she could think of to say.

Leeland, however, looked insulted. _Mine. But monster take._ He sprung to his feet with renewed determination. _Little Bee take back!_

In an instant, he was gone.

"Fuck my life,” Tabby hollered as she took off at a run.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sheila: You invite one (1) Magneto into your house and suddenly you've been colonized by _children._


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What do you MEAN I haven't updated this since July... (Got devoured by exams. Apologies!)

For the second time that morning, Jono jolted awake. This time there was no gentle light creeping through the windows or shiver of butterflies in his bones. He threw off the blankets—where was the boy? Where was the rabbit?—and reached for his hard-light projector, absent from the bedside table. 

Another scream cut through the air, shrill and unyielding. Toddlers screamed, it was in their very nature, but Leeland rarely sounded so gut-wrenchingly panicked as this. Jono joined the rush of feet pounding on the hardwood floors, all of them barreling towards the imperiled toddler.

He didn’t have far to go.

Just down the hall, Leeland had thrown himself onto the floor to scream his bloody lungs out. He didn’t look hurt, or scared, or endangered in any way. The hallway was otherwise empty and all the doors were closed. The only thing unusual was a bowl full of oranges sitting between Leeland and the nearest bedroom door.

**“Rage, rage, against the dying of the light,”** Kitty narrated in her unnatural monotone. She had been the first one up the stairs, but fell back and leaned against the wall instead of dealing with the toddler problem. 

Jono ignored her and bent to haul Leeland to his feet. The moment the boy was in the air, he teleported back to the ground to start a new round of screams. As the New Mutants pushed their way up the stairs at last, Leeland took a deep breath and screamed at an impossible pitch, shearing through every last fiber of his hivemind.

A long tentacle whipped out from under the door and plastered itself over the toddler’s mouth like pissed off Play-Doh, muffling and restraining him in one go.

_“Warlock!”_ Xi’an swatted at the gooey appendage and swept Leeland up into her arms. “You’re okay, you’re okay, we won’t make you eat the oranges sweetheart, you’re okay.” She kept rubbing a hand over his back as she carried him back downstairs. This time, the boy was too panicked to teleport back for a new round of tantrums.

Jono looked from the oranges, to the lingering tentacle, to the door. A toxic scent of orange blossom seeped out from under the frame. He turned back to glower at the other mutants.

The very last round of feet pounded their way up the stairs. As quickly as she burst onto the scene, Tabby hunched over with her hands on her knees, breathing hard. She froze the moment she caught the scent and whipped around to Sam. _“You didn’t.”_

“I had instructions,” Sam groused. He didn’t meet her eyes.

Dani threw up her hands. “Okay, this is ridiculous. Team meeting downstairs in five.”

The tentacle, which had flattened itself against the floor as if thoroughly chastened, sprung back up and branched into ten individual pipe cleaners, bristling peevishly.

“Fine. Ten minutes.”

The worst part of this entire bizarro world was how perfectly fucking normal everyone treated it. At least when Cy was around, the man had the good sense to seem bashful of his otherworldly taint, trying to keep his ink-rot on the inside where it belonged. Leeland had a mountain of secrets in him, but he was human-shaped and didn’t seem to have any complaints about that fact. Mr. Wandering Tentacles over there, on the other hand, had trekked into the Uncanny Valley on a dare and not come back until he was King of the whole shebang. Assuming he ever came back at all.

And the New Mutants, as stuck up and insufferable as he’d ever feared, didn’t bat an eye. The alien could try to smother his own child and all he got was a verbal slap on the wrist. Sprout ten beanstalks and Dani knew he was requesting a ten minute break, as if there were no mental gymnastics to be nimbly executed before the disjointed signals could be slotted together into sense. 

Pot to the kettle it may have been, yet Jono kept remembering its _face._ It shouldn’t have given him pause. Paige changed her skin, Angelo pulled and shifted his. Penance’s face had been scourged of its humanity, sharp and shallow, and Jono’s own had been shredded by the fiery maws nipping at his tattered cheeks. They all changed, they all wore something tangibly inhuman, be it every day or now and again. But it was solid. The bones didn’t change, the eyes didn’t change, the substance was immutable. Human. Personal. The creature, Warlock, was absolutely none of those. Its face shifted from one moment to the next, its bones as malleable as clay, and the bright discs of its eyes never looked the same twice, as if a different person skipped through the circuits with each feigned blink. 

Monsters were monsters, but how did you trust something like _that?_

**“Jono.”**

At length, Jono turned to glare at Kitty. While she looked as nonplussed as he was at the situation, she also looked as nonplussed at _him._

**“You can bail if you want,”** she offered, eyes narrowed. He knew she meant on everything, not just on the meeting. **“I’m going downstairs to wring some answers out of my friend in there.”**

The tentacles flared up, like shoulders drawn up to one’s ears, and slid back under the door into the room behind. 

This time when Jono dragged his exhausted arse and bum leg downstairs, everyone had gathered in the living room in full: Sam and Roberto in twin armchairs, Dani and Xi’an on the couch with Tabby dwarfed in between, and Kitty leaning against the wall with her arms crossed. He wasn’t the last one there. There was still no Warlock.

Jono pulled a stiff wooden chair from the dining room and caught Leeland’s eye as he dragged it back. The boy squirmed in Xi’an’s lap. On a hunch, Jono didn’t sit down backwards and cross his arms over the back of the chair. He sat normally. Within a second of his arse hitting the wood, Leeland popped over into his lap and all but crawled onto Jono’s shoulders. He only managed to make the boy settle once his little arms were firmly wrapped around Jono’s neck. 

With Leeland in his arms, all attention in the room shifted to Jono. He lifted his chin. “So. Oranges the new alien sock on the door?” 

Roberto choked on his drink. Sam went as scarlet as the red-blooded American boy he was, leaning back in his chair to stare at the ceiling instead. The girls took it more easily, covering their mouths or rolling their eyes. 

It was Kitty who cracked up laughing, a weird whooshing hiccup of white noise that sputtered from her suit. **“You think—since last night? Really?”** She shook her head, giggles still crackling out of her. **“Guess Ramsey has eight years of stamina to burn off.”**

Sam hurled a decorative pillow at her, then stared down in betrayed horror at his own hands. “Leeland hates oranges,” he explained dolefully, as though confessing his sins to a priest. “Got squirted in the eye and ain’t gone near one since. ‘Lock asked me to keep our boy out, so I did.”

“It was Dani’s fault,” added Roberto.

Dani didn’t even crack a frown. She’d had this finger pointed too many times to count. “It was an _orange._ It was hardly a dangerous weapon.”

The toxic infusion of orange blossom Febreeze upstairs said otherwise. Still, none of it explained why they needed to keep the kid away from his own parents. There were only two reasons parents— _good_ parents—didn’t want to see their children. Either they were hiding presents or they were having some good old explicit fun.

“That’s _why_ it’s the sock on the door,” Jono offered eventually. “But—”

“Hey Warlock, good timing, we were just talking about your ongoing sexcapades with your selfsoulfriend!”

Reluctantly, and without an inch of repentance, Jono turned his head to see the alien frozen halfway through the dining room. He’d gone rigid and blurred, like an in-between frame of an animation reel, and gaudy streaks of red crayon marred his cheeks in an awkward blush.

**“Scale of one to ten,”** Kitty continued, picking up from Tabby’s teasing call. **“Rate that nerd’s ability to pass out if a girl looks at him too close.”**

Something considerably different passed over Warlock’s face this time, as if the comment had hit too close to an unintended home. “Do-Over!” he crowed, back-peddling into the kitchen. A small countdown clock remained in their sightline and gave a 5, 4, 3, 2, 1—

“Selfriends! Self has arrived for meeting attendance!” Warlock swept into the living room through the parlor on the opposite end of the house. Nobody questioned it.

“Status update?” Dani asked with considerable relief.

Warlock sat down on the floor. Kind of. He shifted his bottom into its own beanbag chair and settled down comfortably upon himself, which was, after all, exactly how human posteriors functioned to begin with. Delightful cushioning. “Threefold mission. Stage One: Eradicate all remaining Selenecode. Considerable Trojanpony devices remained in stasis after her interference. All have now been removed. Stage One: Complete.”

Dani and Xi’an shared a look. “If she still had hooks in him, how did he walk away?”

“Self is getting there,” Warlock huffed. “Stage Two: Stabilize bodily structure. Considerable damage from unknown trauma PLUS recurrent rapid regeneration PLUS frantic meshing of transmode and meatflesh PLUS degeneration from erratic lifeglow fluctuations. Stage Two: Complete. Addendum: Physical health may take upwards of four weeks to return fully.”

“He got hit by a car.”

Warlock paused and turned his head towards Jono, blinking owlishly.

“Don’t know what happened before I found them, but he looked like fucking roadkill. Got hit at least twice the one week. Walked across six states barefoot, too. There’s your trauma.” Jono didn’t look at them as he spoke. He only looked down, idly playing a game of finger-counting with Leeland. He’d never much liked eyes on him – golden saucers with counterfeit emotion were worse.

“Acknowledged,” Warlock answered with a soft voice. He turned back to the others only to find Roberto raising his hand. “Yes?”

“Hey, so, personal favor: Can you please never say _meatflesh_ again?”

Warlock’s hands leapt to his mouth. Clearly, not all of his scripts were entirely accustomed to being back on Earth yet. “…Apologies. Self sorrymortified.”

“And Stage Three?” Dani pushed. Herding cats, every goddamn time. She was glad to have Warlock back, honestly. She just wasn’t so glad to have him, Roberto, and Tabby in the same room. 

Warlock sighed. “Stage Three will be demonstrated via metaphor. Please observe.” He held out one hand and his palm instantly shifted into a model of the human brain. “This is Selfsoulfriendoug prior to lifeglow deficiency. Normal operations.” The lobes and valleys lit up under a web of golden circuitry. “Now transmode addition. Functionality for sudden addition is low, as seen in Selenentity’s army. However, selfsoulfriend already. Erm. Accustomed to viral fusion. Resulting brain function akin to supercomputer. Slower than Technarchbeing, faster than Humanbeing.”

As soon as he’d started waving a brain around, Leeland’s attention had followed. The boy watched the presentation with an enraptured smile, mouth slightly open, and stood up on Jono’s knees for a better look. Jono had to hold him at the waist in a vice grip so he wouldn’t go teetering onto the floor.

Warlock glanced at his smallest audience member with a pinched smile. He held out his second hand. “Selfkin observed this OS and tried to communicate. Selenecode rejected access. Selfkin pushed. Access denied. Selfkin reacted according to babybeing protocol.” Warlock whipped the brain into his other hand where it smashed like spaghetti against the wall. 

The room fell silent.

Leeland giggled and clapped his hands.

Staring at the spaghetti-brain dripping down Warlock’s wrist, Jono had to admit it explained a lot about Cy. All the parts were there. They’d just been thrown in a blender, dried out, and used for macaroni art. 

With a wide smile, Warlock finished, “Bad News: Stage Three consumes time. Good News: Selfkin is genius!”

When the New Mutants finally reacted, it was to lurch forward with a barrage of questions. 

“What do you mean _genius—”_

“How _much_ time—”

“Is he still Doug? What kind of damage is—”

Warlock raised his hands in a shushing gesture. It didn’t help.

“If his brain was spaghetti and DJ was feeding off him, does that make him a cannibal?”

“Will he remember anything?”

“Is there anything we can do?”

_“Why_ did Leeland think he could—”

With a sharp whistle like a kettle letting out steam, Warlock settled the room. “Selfsoulfriend and Selfkin share same transmode strain. Kinship easily recognizable. Mutual magnetism. This is same problem now. Self has restoration process working on Selfsoulfriend, but if Selfkin interferes it will return to spaghetti. Do not let him in.”

Jono instinctively tightened his grip on Leeland’s waist, especially as the boy began to wiggle and jump in excitement. He could tell they were talking about him. The more he was the center of attention, after being on the run for so long, the more joy built up in his tiny body, ready to explode. 

“Selfsoulfriendoug will still be Selfsoulfriendoug.” He said it with such ease and conviction that the room’s mood calmed at once. “Self expects no long-term damage. Only recent memory may suffer.”

The room’s palpable relief was not shared by Jono. Everything would be the same in their dear old Doug, great, cheers. But Cy was dead and gone. Four months wiped. 

“Self will alert selfriends when visitation hours commence,” Warlock finished with a small, pleased smile. 

Dani took control of the meeting after that. Everyone had to obey Warlock’s orders, give Doug’s room a wide berth, and focus on distracting the toddler. The New Mutants would remain onsite until Doug woke up. At that point there would be an evaluation of the situation, and then they would all return to Utopia. No one voiced any objections. Jono played patty-cake with Leeland and didn’t say a word.

Once she disbanded everyone, the team drifted awkwardly towards the kitchen. They kept one eye on Warlock even as they chattered and pretended to help Sam with the towers of dishes. Poor man had grown up doing dishes for a dozen and would never free himself of the burden.

**“Take me upstairs.”**

Kitty’s voice was low and dangerous, a computer supervillain from an old movie. She’d cornered Warlock in the parlor so they were far enough from the rest of the team, out of earshot of anyone else whose opinion mattered.

However Warlock responded – a spin of the eyes, a loading screen with echoes of dialup noises – it was enough for Kitty to step forward and press her palm against his chest. In her suit, there was nothing she could do to look threatening, but their closeness was charged with something Jono didn’t understand. 

**“You know how long I’ve waited.”** She bit her lip, drawing attention to it by virtue of its impossibility; could a ghost harm itself in strife? **“You don’t get to just—swoop in and think this is all about _you._ Take me upstairs to see him.”**

“No,” Warlock whispered. He curled his own hands over hers, still pressed against his chest. _“You_ don’t get to jeopardize his health and think this is all about _you.”_

Kitty’s mouth dropped, and Jono stared fixedly at the wiggly baby in his grasp.

**“How can I jeopardize anything from inside this thing?!”** A pause, words stitching themselves back into line. **“—What happened to you? This isn’t like you, Warlock. We’re a team. We’re all _your_ team but you—”**

By the way the whirling cords of shadow dipped forward, Warlock had bent to kiss her; towards lips or forehead, Jono didn’t want to know. What Emma Frost wouldn’t give for him to turn in an intel report on all this fuckery.

**“Warlock—”**

“Self has always trusted humanfriends on humanthings. Please trust Self on Selfthings. _Please,_ selfdearestfriend.”

A moment later, Kitty stormed off upstairs. Warlock waited until he heard the lock of her door – hers, not Doug’s – before finally letting his shoulders droop. He stood there for many minutes as still as a statue, graphite trying to embody steel.

“…Selves have not been introduced,” he announced at last. 

Jono jolted in his seat. The voice was audible, yes, but also buzzed and zinged across the mess of communication cables Leeland had grafted into him. Illegal radio waves itching between his temples. He wondered if it was the way his own voice had sounded to people, when all he could do was hurl it towards the target of another’s mind.

The child in his arms startled just as much, pressed back against Jono’s chest for safety. An image of a rabbit flashed into Jono’s head, fluffy and terrified, bolting from bush to bush as it made a hasty retreat. Nice as it sounded, Jono pushed back with an image of his own: the frantic whirl of bunnies overtaking Leeland with affection and nibbles at the fair. Overwhelming, safe, and good. 

He hoped. If Warlock did anything to prove otherwise, Jono would be back on the road with a babe in tow in five seconds flat.

Warlock rubbed a hand over his face, curling his knuckles in an odd gesture as if pinching a nose he didn’t possess, then dropped it to hang by his side. “Outside?” he offered quietly, eyes flashing towards the kitchen.

Finally, someone who had a bit of sense in them. Jono was sick and tired of the American coalition’s obsession with airing all their laundry in public for team morale. 

Jono bopped Lee on the head, _Up we go,_ and hauled him out the front door. They didn’t go far, settling into the cushioned porch swing that had been warmed by the morning sun. 

Warlock followed them out, all elbows, and tugged the door shut behind him. Without his gaggle of friends, he looked out of place in the sun, a creature carved from nightshine and never meant to see the light of day. For every gaunt hint of bone, a thick cord of feigned musculature curled around his skeleton. Faint lines marked out useless toenails on his overly humanized feet. They had the weight and wear of a runner, yet all Jono remembered was the way shadows had shot through the fair like a crashing wave, no athleticism needed.

The alien sat down on a nearby table as if it were a chair and, threading his fingers together, began to speak. “Self has found that in teamup situations, it is protocol to admit how much knowledge Self possesses of newfriend. Self knows you studied with Selfteacherbanshee. Self was not living in Americanation at that time and soon Self returned to Self’s planet. Conclusion: Self’s knowledge of you is meager. Insufficient to fully form thanks for all you have done.”

“I know jack shit about you,” Jono answered with a weak shrug. He was still trying to parse through the weird cadence. What did Selfteacherbanshee mean, exactly? If Sean had ever taught an interstellar coral formation, he’d never spoken of it to them. 

“Really?” Warlock gave one of those owlish blinks again. Whether or not his shock ran deeper than the performance, Jono couldn’t tell. “But Self thought—”

Jono held Leeland up by the armpits as Exhibit A. “If I knew what this was, I’d have kept my distance.” The boy giggled and kicked his feet.

Something dimmed in Warlock’s smile; a change in wattage.

“Instead I got sucked into your alien child custody debacle and here we all are.” He set Leeland down on his lap and the child immediately leaned back and started trying to tug the long lines of Jono’s lips off his face. Rude little shit. 

“…You know nothing of Technarchs?” Warlock asked at length, watching them both curiously. 

“Bits. I know how Leeland eats. I’ve seen Cy’s black guts trying to crawl out of his body. And Magneto acted like I’d picked up fucking Legacy virus from you.” He leveled a scathing look at Warlock. “That true?”

“You’re immune,” Warlock hummed, something strange in his voice. Stranger than usual.

“To _all_ of you?”

A smile cracked onto Warlock’s face, sharp and unplanned. It felt like he was more than just giving Jono a once-over with his eyes – who knew how many senses were now fixated on him, scanning and evaluating on levels he didn’t have words for. All he did know was that the question was the right one.

“To _Cy._ Probably to Selfkin. Not to Self.” The longer they spoke, the more Warlock’s speech curled itself into new shape, mirroring Jono’s own usage. Except for the _Self._ It wasn’t quite a threat, but it wasn’t anything else, either.

“Because you’re the Source?”

Warlock shook his head and let his hands rest limply on his knees. Even though he was too tall, too gangly for it to look natural, there was still something non-threatening about it. “Negative. It _is_ a virus. It is how Technarchs digest food. In simplest terms: You are food to Self. You are not food to humanoids.” 

Just two days earlier, _You are food to Self_ would’ve had him throwing the baby over one shoulder like a sack of potatoes and taking off at a run. Now Jono didn’t blink. 

“Virus is also _part_ of Technarchs. Analogy: Humans are bags of blood. Blood has your genecode. Blood has your past/present/future.” He tapped his chin. “But blood not sentient.”

Was everything out of the alien’s mouth always a low budget horror movie in the making?

“Technarch ‘blood’ is sentient and recognizes food/friend. Continual mix/merge with humans resulted in new humanoid strain. Request for confirmation: Does this make sense?”

Warlock’s expectant look was one Jono recognized, that of a substitute teacher hoping to make headway with a difficult student. Jono lived to disappoint. “So it doesn’t eat humans because they’re humans.”

“Correct.”

“But we were on the run for months because they thought you were going to eat them.”

This time, none of the alien’s shock was performative. His crest curled downwards like a dog’s tail, tucking itself around his shoulders in a rigid veil. “That—That is—” Warlock dropped his head into his hands. “…Self’s species are cannibals,” he admitted glumly. “SELF is not. Self would never. But instinct triggered by paternity and—they had no _data_ about whether Self would—”

Warlock sighed and looked up, still leaning his cheek into the palm of one hand. “Selfsoulfriendoug much better at explanations than Self. Self…tries. Human words and concepts, these are easy. But…Selfsoulfriend understands how humans think. Sometimes Self believes Self never will.”

Despite himself, Jono hid a thin smile behind Leeland’s head. “I know the feeling, mate.”

When Warlock began talking again, he wasn’t looking at Jono. He was looking at his son. “Self came here when Self was very young. No older than Selfkin. Lonely and lost and scared. But humans—mutants—found Self and saved Self and, and loved Self. It meant everything. Self is not like Self’s people, Friendjono. Self has tried to change Self and tried to change Self’s people. Results…unknown. Humans are different. Always changing and always the same. Always wonderful and horrible. Always alive. Always surprising Self.”

“Please tell me this isn’t leading to the Miracle of Interspecies Life talk.”

Warlock’s elbow slipped off his knee, his posture a Picasso painting as so many limbs screeched back into order. 

“When a boy and an alien—”

“Observe: Humans are _horrible._ Rottenbeings with nastyguts that no Self-respecting-Self would ever eat. Disgusting.” Warlock huffed an imaginary nose into the air. “Self’s species are asexual and do not reproduce through—”

Jono raised the baby into the air once more.

Warlock threw up his hands. “Self is trying to be _communicative_ and answer Jonofriend’s questions!”

“Oh, I’ve got one. Why’re you squawking at me when your kid’s right here? Long way to go to chase down a baby and not even say hello.”

“Query: Who says Self is not doing both?”

Jono paused and looked down at the baby, whose gaze was fixed on the alien with single-minded focus. Once Leeland had stopped shoving his grubby fingers all over Jono’s face, Jono had stopped paying attention to him beyond making sure he didn’t fall onto the floor. When he tried to turn the kid around, Leeland inclined his head back at a terrifyingly unnatural angle to continue watching Warlock.

_“Christ,_ just ask for your kid like a normal—”

“Selfkin believes Self has abducted his BigBee and will similarly do away with you if he vacates your lap.” Warlock waved a hand between himself and Leeland, demonstrating how the boy’s murderous intent never flickered or wavered from its target. “We have been arguing this entire time.”

But Leeland hadn’t been moving. His hands were still at his sides.

Jono raked a nervous hand through his hair, wishing Cy were there to moderate the situation. He couldn’t be sure he was doing any of this right. And if Warlock failed to bond with his son, then he knew where the blame might fall.

“Either you’re playing psychic chess, or you haven’t gotten anywhere,” Jono hazarded grimly. If it was the former, he was no help, but if it was the latter…

“Self is…rattling doorknobs.” Warlock looked narrower, as if in drawing in his shoulders he’d squeezed away part of his body mass. Sheepish. 

“He’s not afraid of you. He’s a good kid and Cy taught him to use his words. And now you’re here trying to get him to ditch kindergarten and snort pop rocks behind the gym.” Jono pulled Leeland’s little hands in front of him, finally breaking the trance. “Use your words, dumbass.”

Annoyance in his brow, disbelief in his eyes, and a touch of rebellion frizzling through his crest, but still Warlock held up his hands and dutifully did as told. _\-----, I/Self ------._

“He’s two. Simple words.”

“But he is genius—”

“Simple. Words.”

_Hello._ Warlock’s hands were slow and precise, fingers bending like the legs of an insect. _I am friend._

_Hi._

Leeland answered instantly, then glanced back for Jono’s approval. When he got a nod, he bravely continued. _Your words are spaghetti._

Jono laughed so loud even Leeland startled, turning again to see what had caused the sudden whoosh of breath into his hair. He squished a hand against Jono’s mouth to shut him up. The important people were talking and if he didn’t successfully negotiate he might never see his Big Bee again.

_You took Big Bee,_ he accused with his sternest face.

_Yes. Big Bee sick._

_Little Bee knows. Little Bee not stupid._ Leeland curled a fist and tapped it against his mouth, thoughtful. He banged it there a couple times before any more words came. _You are same. And different. This is my hive. Not your hive. Go away._

“Leeland!” Jono turned him around and scowled. _Be nice. Monster is friend._

_No! My hive! Monster take!_

Jono ruffled at the boy’s hair, brushing it all out of shape. _He is Big Bee’s hive. Now Big Bee is sick and monster is very scared. He does not have hive. He does not have rabbit. He needs you. Can you be brave?_

Leeland pushed at his chest. _Little Bee is bravest!_ He scrambled down from Jono’s lap and stood between his two elders on the porch. _Why you scared, SpagheBee? You are scariest._

“…Not sure I helped.”

Warlock flashed him a look that said very clearly: you called me a monster to my son, and you sir will pay. Not now. When you least expect it. How you least expect it. But your time will come. 

If he’d had a hat, Jono would have doffed it. Instead, he stood up, shoved his hands into his jacket pockets, and headed back inside. 

“Take it from here, SpagheBee.”

  


* * *

  


Limbo had WiFi now.

Well, sort of. Warlock certainly hadn’t used those words – he’d used a phrase longer than anything in any of her spellbooks, however arcane – but it boiled down to this: the alien egg in the nursery was a wireless hotspot. Every few minutes back on Earth, Warlock would ping the egg to confirm its status, and Limbo’s shifting geography meant he had to sweep a broad area for the signal. Anything else caught in range would be ferried across the link, and anything from the other side could slip through. Larger data packets didn’t work so well. Videos warped into fractured monstrosities, white-eyed ghosts tearing into the frames. Small things worked fine. 

**K: He won’t let anyone see Doug. Even me.**  
**I: He thinks you cannot throttle him with your ghostly little hands. Prove him wrong.**

It would be at least fifteen minutes before the next ping, so Illyana set down her phone on the table, screen up. Jet black with oddly intricate silver trim, it had been a present from Roberto the day after Kitty returned to Earth. She hadn’t said thank you. Appreciation meant caring, caring meant functional emotions, emotions meant an intact soul. The logic had made sense.

Now she had a soul and didn’t feel any different at all. 

On the flight back to Utopia, the cargo hold packed with techno-organic prison cells, Amara and Illyana had barely exchanged a word. They’d never been close, and that suited them fine. When the plane landed, Amara had put it into park and turned to look at Illyana with a guarded, frustrated face. 

“Is it over?”

Illyana opened her mouth to say yes, then stopped. Something in Amara’s voice was familiar, recent, the same exhaustion and determination sustaining her now as weeks earlier on Genosha, when she’d thrown down her sword on Selene’s ashen corpse and spit, _May the earth rest heavy upon you._

“I don’t know,” Illyana answered instead. She didn’t try to look honest or forceful. She just spoke. “Last time everyone was dead. I didn’t get this far.” 

“Alright.”

Amara rose from her seat and waited for Illyana to do the same. The senator’s daughter and the sneaky witch; there wasn’t a place in the world where those puzzle pieces would ever slot neatly together. But Amara held out a hand. “If you saved my life, then you have my thanks.”

Illyana stared at her and didn’t take the handshake.

With a laugh, Amara raised her arms into a stretch instead. “Someday you will call the debt. I know you.”

“Spar with me,” she blurted, not a thought in her head beyond erasing the debt immediately. Teammates didn’t have debts. She kept hearing Warlock’s sad, fond words: _We are no longer children. Everything has a price._

The shock on Amara’s face fled as swiftly as it arrived. “I have read that that’s how Old Rome fell – She taught the barbarians all Her tricks.” 

“The proud little wolf fears her betters.”

“We’ll see.”

Illyana’s phone buzzed angrily on the playroom table, jerking her back to the present. She snatched it up.

**K: I don’t have the right adapter to hack his ass rn**  
**K: Also do you know how hard it is to text in this godforsaken suit?  
**I: I’m sure you’ll tell me.****

_Tell me everything. Don’t sleep. Stay up all night tossing electronic bottles into a foolish alien’s ocean._

Illyana put down the phone.

She didn’t quite know what to do with herself.

Limbo had a castle, all her own, but now that the lands were unquestionably hers she took no pleasure in their ruling. If she ever had. Memories, borrowed and owned, could be as hazy as the mists of the northern badlands, a whirling void of whispers where she’d once taken Leeland for the weekend. Socializing him to all manner of spirit. It was her right.

All was now within her rights, so if she deigned to hole up in the burrow of a nursery that housed the baby photos of monstrous children, she would. 

Illyana picked up the phone. Still nothing. She sat it on her leg and waited for the vibrations.

Her castle of cards had outlived its use; one by one she needed to return each suit to the deck, sparing nary an ace to hide up her sleeve, but one by one she found the cards snatched from her grasp. Warlock had his own castle to build now. She had no advice to give. She only willed his foundations be sound.

Judging by the secret alien egg in the corner, they were already crumbling. 

**K: He says he’s working on fixing Doug’s brain but I think he’s just sat there stroking his face like a creeper**  
**I: That sounds exactly like every sleepover we ever had**  
**K: We’re not friends and I’m not talking to you ever again**  
**I: I’m sure your sausage fingers will appreciate the break**

This was what Illyana knew about Douglock: Once upon a time, the New Mutants lost three little children. War took one, Science took another, and Disease took the third. When the crying stopped and everyone looked away, Science scooped up two of the corpses while the Devil made off with the third. They each made something new wearing a borrowed face. To Douglock they gave scripts. To Illyana they gave a fractured soul.

This was what Illyana knew about Kitty: She took Douglock in. She called him Doug. She took Illyana in. She called her by no other name.

This was what Illyana knew about Warlock: He carried a sparrow’s nest through a battlefield against all instinct, denying his body, denying his conscience, thinking only with the heart, the way he had as a child. The way they had all forgotten. He brought this nest to her because he could bring it to no one else. He could not face his team. He would not face Kitty.

Illyana wanted to take Kitty’s head in her hands and hold it until that brilliant mind whirled itself to calm, until it understood that no matter what kinship she claimed with ghosts, she could not name the ones she met. Illyana also wanted to take Kitty’s head in her hands and do something very, very different. A softness more alien than anything in the tale so far.

Illyana was carved from the bones of a dead little girl and Kitty did not understand. Douglock was carved from the bones of a dead boy and Kitty did not understand that either. But Douglock had decided he was something _new,_ while all Illyana wanted was to be something _old,_ and this her mind turned to again and again. 

If the egg felt the weight of her interrogation, it gave no sign. It pulsed with a low light, crystalline and blue like a cloudless sky, but with a baseball-sized yolk in mottled orange. The generators fed it dozens of demons a day and still it showed no sign of growth. Perhaps its mass grew instead of its volume, a consuming void of black matter – just like its father.

**K: Everything is about Leeland. Nobody talks about Doug at all, it’s baby this and baby that**  
**I: He grows on you**  
**K: Like a mold?**  
**I: Yes. Like his father.**

Kitty had no love for the infant. It was a truth that settled strangely in Illyana’s chest. When she had first snatched up the boy and whisked him to Limbo for ransom, let him wobble his way through the dread-carved corridors of Belasco’s Castle, she found herself expecting a housecat to bound past every open doorway. The boy needed a guardian. For the first time in a long time, she thought of Cat, of the kindness and coldness in her own raising, of those lessons of survival.

It was a silly dream. They all had them.

Sam with a tiny slip of sunshine in his arms, a boy with farmhand freckles and messy locks the color of fresh cut straw. How many times had he snuck the child off to the planetarium, to the air and space museums, to the heavens above when he thought no one would find out. They all had such thoughts, but only Sam wore them on his face, unguarded and gleeful at every small achievement. Even Roberto guarded his plans carefully, like a preteen hiding his cards at a corporate poker game. Amara’s dream extended no further than a ward raised to adulthood, a young man carrying a family name that didn’t deserve to disappear. Dani’s she never shared. Leong and Nga had one, too – a child that would never be kidnapped and experimented on again. Illyana had rather infringed upon that one, to be fair.

Leeland was himself a silly dream. Illyana made no secret that the first time around, everyone had died, and she had scarcely escaped back to knot the threads of fate and feed them through the loom again with greater care. She’d never told them the boy was new. The loom already stood ready. The pattern had changed. The weaver absent.

So Illyana felt Cat’s hand on her shoulder and wished for Kitty’s hand to fall on Leeland’s. That was fair. That was right. That was close enough to a silly dream for a matched set, was it not?

But now there was an egg in the corner and everyone built a different castle in the shifting sands. There was nowhere safe for her to build. There would be nowhere for Doug to build, either. This she knew. Freefall was their lot. Warlock’s fingers couldn’t link into a safety net wide enough for all.

**K: I wish you were here**

Silly dreams.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If Self _enunciates_ very _clearly_ then maybe humanfriends will not ask _infuriatingly stupid questions._


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is NOT on hold/hiatus/anything, I swear, I am just so rubbish at editing what I've got. Oh to have a job that allows for reliable free time...
> 
> Brief warning for Warlock's pov leading him to very ableist conclusions, but Tabby puts a right stop to that nonsense.

Warlock was great with infants. Brilliant, even. A squishy huggy wiggle man who could turn into every whim of imagination, a toymaker’s delight. Even alien babies were no match for his charm and the way he slipped easily into their language and form, a soft-eyed teen without a threatening fang in his grinning mouth. He’d even won over _Tyro_ , proving that on the scale of terrifying Technarchs he was a brilliant outlier of calm reliability. 

Leeland didn’t want toys or humanoid faces or a calm exterior. He didn’t want Warlock to poke in his tiny castle of a head, he didn’t want Warlock to plug him in like an external hard drive, and he scowled and stamped his feet at Warlock’s swift fingers. Worst of all, the baby was _bored_ of him. Never in all his (admittedly few) years had Warlock suffered such an insult.

_Did you eat today, Selfkin?_

When he got no response, Warlock held up one hand like a plate and cycled through a wide buffet of delicious dishes. He even manufactured the appropriate scents. _Mmm, yummy lifeglow!_

Leeland stared at him without blinking.

Maybe he was being condescending. Leeland was a Technarch, wasn’t he? When Warlock was that age, he’d already whipped through half the known universe, crash-landed on a new planet with far too many languages and customs to juggle, and enrolled himself in education with his teammates. 

_Self apologizes for speaking down to you Selfkin!! Self understands how frustrating it must be to navigate this Earthworld in miniature humanoidform without full capacity/training/experience in heritageskills. Humanbabybeings do not provide sufficient stimulus for building of transmodeawareness and Self is terriblyawfullytremendously sorry for this oversight. You are genius of grand stock! Self will endeavor to—_

Leeland watched his dancing fingers as though the pickle had just leapt out of his sandwich and expressed its desire to enroll in ballet school. 

_Or…not…_

Did signing humans talk to _themselves_ in sign? What was the custom? Warlock had never met anyone who disposed of verbal communication before. He’d made a quick survey when the other New Mutants showed their own ability and apparently he’d made a muddle of it. It was like when he first came to Earth and tried to gossip with the refrigerator, except this time _he_ was the empty-headed appliance.

Warlock rubbed his hands over his face. It would be so _easy_ if Leeland would simply link with him. Then he could run a full inventory of his script stats and know what they were working with. Maybe he could even find the right button in his Technarch parts that had turned off his audio components and then there wouldn’t be any problems at all.

Because right now, Warlock had one very, very, very Big Problem and it wasn’t his son. For the first time the problem wasn’t transmode black or Phalanx gold or human’s blood red. He’d balanced all those humors back into order in Doug’s ailing body and he seemed to be recovering just fine. The only problem was the fourth humor that appeared out of nowhere to balance the set.

Doug’s lifeglow was blue.

Not all of it. Enough that it wouldn’t leave Warlock’s thoughts. Enough that its mystery choked out all else, a bottleneck of bewilderment. As Doug’s transmode receded and his human flesh and bone stepped up to resume control, his natural lifeglow replenished itself with every beat of his heart. But just as hidden veins of gold curled through his nervous system, so now did faint breaths of blue whisper through his lungs. Warlock was not a religious creature – all things could be attributed to lifeglow in one way or another. And he knew exactly who to attribute it to.

It wasn’t the odd shade of Jono’s skin that tipped him off but the maelstrom churning in his chest, a vortex that no one else appeared to see. Like tactical heat vision, humans tended to express their lifeglow regularly throughout their bodies with higher concentrations in head and torso. Mutants often showed distinct, individual lifeglow signatures. The chasm in Jono, however, was like nothing Warlock had ever seen. Closer to trying to read the sun, or throwing a sensory auxiliary into a black hole. Familiar in a way he couldn’t begin to place. Nobody else commented on it.

Warlock had a sinking suspicion about what they had done and Leeland was the only potential witness. He had to connect. Worse yet, the child had been raised with so little schooling in his Technarch heritage that if he grew much older without intervention, he’d never master the fine details – just as Tyro’s education had stagnated at crucial points. He couldn’t fail another son.

_Will you tell Self a story?_

Instead of sullen silence, the child finally snapped. He grabbed for Warlock’s hands and gasped as they crumpled like foil in his fists. Warlock pulled back in shock, Leeland dug his nails into the fleeing strips of seaweed, and before either of them knew what had happened, Warlock’s gnarled fingers dropped to the ground and shattered.

Leeland screamed.

Warlock, keeping his own screaming internal, shot off a frantic text message and retreated to the opposite end of the room. He clutched his hands to his chest even as they immediately reformed; he didn’t like being torn apart better than anyone else and he’d had his fair share of it already, thanks.

“Warlock! Is everything—” Tabby rushed into the open door, phone still in hand. She took one look at the disembodied joints still clutched in Leeland’s hand and chucked her phone at Warlock’s anguished face. It cracked into the plaster just next to his head. “What the _fuck_ did you—"

“He amputated Self! Escalated Query: What have you been teaching him?!?!?”

Anger flashed in Tabby’s eyes, crackling like a timebomb before bursting into indignation and disappointment in equal measure. “That he’s _loved_ you psycho.” She turned away to focus on Leeland, smoothing down his tousled hair and letting him sob into her shoulder. 

_Want me to get Rabbit? Do you want Rabbit?_

Leeland shook his head glumly. He’d stashed his rabbit under Jono’s pillow so he’d always have an excuse to go back. Plus his guardian had been extra sad so he might need the rabbit more. 

_What happened?_

Leeland held out his hand full of uncooked spaghetti, each piece bent at an unnatural angle, then dropped them to the floor like a game of pickup sticks. _Broke monster. Monster scream._

Tabby rubbed her hands over her face. _Not monster. Friend. Good friend._

Leeland gave the most insolent little shrug she’d ever seen in her life, and she’d grown up with _Rictor._ This was going to be harder than she thought. 

“Warlock. Spill.”

The alien threw up his hands. “Self cannot communicate! Self is incompatible!”

“Excuse me? You’re the one who always bragged about how Technarchs have seventy senses for humans’ five, you telling me you can’t get by without _one?”_

“Technarchs are vocal people!”

Tabby shook her head in disbelief. Years back, hearing Warlock call Technarchs _people_ would’ve been a huge step forward. But this, right now, was absolutely ridiculous. 

Warlock himself cringed at how it sounded. “Self does not _require_ audio for communication, but—but baby will not respond to interhive communication! He rejects mindlanguage and mouthlanguage and printlanguage and handlanguage and Self has nothing left!”

Tabby turned towards the sour-faced baby. _My friend wants to talk to you._

_Little Bee talk!_ Leeland kicked angrily at a footstool, harder and harder until he’d kicked it with such force that his body popped halfway across the room in a defense mechanism. _Monster talk wrong! Not listen!_

“He says you—”

Warlock scowled. “Affirmative. Thank you. Self understands handlanguage.”

She crossed her arms and leaned back against the wall. “So how do you talk wrong?”

Leeland grabbed at the hem of her shirt and gave it an angry yank. Realizing her mistake in cutting him out of the conversation, Tabby crouched down to sit with him at once. _Sorry Little Bee. Warlock, how do you talk wrong?_

Warlock’s fingers curled into mittens, fists with no definition between the fingers. “Self does _not_ talk wrong.”

“Dude, if your fragile little ego can’t handle your own toddler laughing at you, then you’re done. I will take him and go. Do not fucking test me.” She signed along as she spoke, but said something considerably different when Leeland was watching – _It is okay. We will teach!_

Warlock wouldn’t meet her eyes. His crest drooped and his—

“Yeah, you’re like, real fucking crest-fallen. Good for you. Still not an apology.”

Blinking back would-be tears at the rebuke, Warlock dropped his shoulders and slowly raised them once more in a show of determination. He returned to the carpet in the center of the room and plopped himself down next to Tabby. Tabby gave him a demanding yet encouraging nod and Warlock raised his new hands.

_I am sorry. You scared me._

Leeland didn’t stop frowning, but he did answer. _Why you scared?_

_I am scared you won’t like me._ Warlock snuck a glimpse at Tabby for reassurance. _I am not human. Humans always scared. Make me scared too._

“I’m not sure he understands _human,”_ Tabby mumbled softly.

Before they could come up with a better word, Leeland had started to answer. _Rabbits always scared. Humans have to be brave so rabbits are not scared. So Little Bee is brave. If monster is scared then Little Bee will be extra brave._

Tabby’s jaw dropped.

_Thank you._ Warlock leaned forward on his knees, hissing sideways at Tabby, “Query: Sign for Technarch? Did you make one?”

_Starchild._

Leeland jolted. _Monster is starchild? Oh! Funny lifeglow!_

_My lifeglow is funny?_

_Like Little Bee and Big Bee! Lifeglow needs to eat. Humans have guts that eat instead._

“What did he say we eat?” Tabby asked, trying to catch up. They all knew he’d spent the last few months with the world’s only undead omniglot, but no one had considered what that would mean. 

“Erm—”

Leeland grabbed Warlock’s hands again and this time he didn’t pull away. The boy tugged and pushed on the alien’s fingers as if kneading dough, trying to shape them into the right form for signs. 

_Talking funny too. Why fingers long?_ Leeland pushed his little palm up against Warlock’s, inspecting how the alien’s fingers grew more like crab legs than the nimble stubs and joints of his humans. _Make fingers shorter. Monster made new fingers. Make again but short!_

Tabby giggled and reached out to close her hands over both of theirs, giving them a squeeze. “I think you’ll be fine, Warlock.”

“Negative, wait, Self has questions—”

Tabby leaned in and gave Leeland a kiss on the top of his head. _Take care of my friend. I need to eat. Very hungry._

Leeland popped up on his knees, threw his arms around Tabby’s neck, and gave her a kiss on her cheek. _Enjoy yummies!_

Even with Warlock desperately reaching for her, Tabby soon took her leave. They had to bond on their own. She and Warlock could compare notes later. Besides, she needed to go tell the New Mutants that they’d need to beef up their vocabulary and fast.

Alone once more, Warlock turned back to his son and dutifully retracted his fingertips. He’d spent a lifetime observing and mimicking humans down to the slightest twitch of simulated muscle. He could do this. 

Tapping his knee, Leeland launched into questions of his own. _What starchild are you? Little Bee and Big Bee are from Earthstar. You are different._

_Yes. I am not from Earthstar. I am from very far away. Star’s name is—_

Warlock paused. They hadn’t taught fingerspelling to Leeland beyond a few letters to differentiate his many moms and dads. He slowly showed Leeland the signs for Empty, Hive, and Star before blurring them together to make _Kvch._

Leeland gave a wide-eyed blink. _What happen to hive?_

_I do not know._

Leeland considered this for a moment. _What happen to **your** hive?_

_…I am alone,_ Warlock admitted. _I lost my hive. But this is my home. I came home to find my hive._

_Okay._ Leeland beamed, bright and warm. _Lonely makes scary starchild. It okay._

_…Thank you._

Warlock could barely look at the child for how bright he shone. For all his time with Tyro, parenthood was still a foreign concept, one that took all his effort to untangle and shape into Technarch form. The child’s easy acceptance and open heart were the ultimate proof of his birthright – he was human, through and through. His Technarch genes hadn’t been able to ruin that. It was a blessing Warlock wouldn’t soon forget.

_You came home too,_ said Warlock.

The message made sense to Leeland, even if the concept was too big for him to gather up in his hands. He repeated Home and added _Bee_ and _Music_ and still couldn’t wrangle the essence of it. Finally he simply said, _Rabbit._

Carefully reaching out, ready to pull back at any second, Warlock ruffled Leeland’s hair and gave him a grand piano smile. Home was a feeling, not a place. Leeland had figured that out on his own already.

Home was also people. While Warlock wasn’t sure how to make that part stick, he was determined to try.

_Did hive show you pictures?_ Warlock pulled out a small handful of photos. All were shifted from his body and memories, though Leeland didn’t need to know that. The first one was a team photo of the nine of them taken a few weeks after their earliest romp through Asgard. _Do you know them?_

Leeland nodded with obvious excitement. First he pointed to Xi’an. _That S-mom! And D-mom! With skyhorse!_

He was so giddy to see their younger selves that Warlock knew he’d never seen the old pictures. His heart pounded in his chest, a diffusion of pressure that thudded throughout his entire torso. 

_S-dad!_ Leeland rubbed his fingers over the high forehead and giraffe neck, grinning. His dad looked like a broom! _B-dad so short! Like Little Bee!_

Warlock swallowed his laughter – the next time Roberto tried to call the boy DJ, Warlock would call him _Little B._

_Starchild is there!_

Although that contagious delight in his son helped to calm Warlock’s nerves, he still quaked like jelly inside. _This is my family. Same family. Selfkin you are my family. Understand?_

_No._ Leeland’s eyes darted from the picture to Warlock and back. _Starchild not my moms and dads._

_Who is this?_ Warlock pulled his son’s little hand towards the golden-haired boy sitting in the front row. 

_Me!_

_No. This is Big Bee._

_Me!_

Warlock rubbed both hands over his face. For the first time in his life, he understood what a struggle it had been for the New Mutants to find him and communicate. He _loved_ his selfsoulfriend, but he’d never quite understood why the other children thought they couldn’t manage without him. In his memories, he’d picked up English lickety-split and made bosom buddies of them all with only a handful of missteps. 

He needed Doug. Doug was the one who listened to the language with one ear and the gaps with the other. He’d know what Leeland was trying to express, how to navigate the spaces between adoptive parents and blood ones, why Leeland was so determined on his hivenames while also changing them at the drop of a hat. From what Jono said, no matter how broken his selfsoulfriend’s head was, he’d always communicated perfectly with his son. 

Which made Warlock a failure.

Warlock tapped on the picture of a teenage Doug once more, trying for a natural grin. _Tell me about him?_

_Mine. Same._ He started trying to flip through the photos as Warlock hurried to shift more and more of them, grabbing snapshots out of the blue. _Give kiss and tell stories. Loves me more than MOON. Rabbits live in moon and Big Bee loves me more!_

_Save Little Bee from the bad men and the big cars and the yucky food. Got hurt here and here and here. Then got me ice cream! We saw the trees and the mud and the river. Scared and not scared. He go away._ Leeland tapped his hand against his chest. _He here._

Leeland gave him a funny look after that, and Warlock couldn’t blame him. He knew from Tabby that the kid had some level of empathic awareness in him, probably less than Warlock’s own capacity, but even an inanimate hunk of charcoal would feel the surging warmth, pride, and despair in him right now. 

_Is he your dad?_ Warlock asked, nudging, trying. There was something there that neither of them could find the right words for.

_No he’s me._

_Who is Little Bee?_

_Me!_

_Who is Little Bee’s dad?_

At that, Leeland paused. The logic was so convoluted and simple all at once. 

_Who is Rabbit’s dad?_

Leeland squirmed. His hive had layers upon layers with only one on the surface, the one that his moms and dads built with him. But the monster was right – he had other layers now, too. So maybe they had dads. But. His head hurt.

_Tired,_ Leeland announced. _Sleep now._

Hesitantly, Warlock again reached out and ruffled his hair until it was a fluffy mess. He hated to leave things there, he’d been so close, but there was no point in forcing him. He’d spent weeks getting Tyro to trust him enough to lump his way over to inspect the taller, spindlier baby; he could spend a few more days building Leeland’s trust. 

_Sleep where?_ Warlock asked. He knew the rest of the team had very firm opinions on it.

The contorted scowl that Leeland gave in answer didn’t give him any other choice.

  


* * *

  


With nothing to do and exhaustion still gnawing at his bones, Jono had given up on the day long ago. No guitar, no data left on his phone, and nothing else in his duffel beyond far too many quarters. He didn’t have the heart to count them and see if there’d be enough for a bus ticket out of there. That could wait for morning.

There were plenty of books on the shelf: The Invisible Origins of Legal Positivism, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure with ten volumes of commentary, and such riveting literature as the Gulag Archipelago. They’d certainly put him to sleep. He’d just have to pry himself off the bed to get them, which sounded like work. 

Jono rolled over and pressed his face into the pillow. Lumpy. 

A familiar red rabbit sat underneath. Jono tucked it under his chin and breathed. Stardust and iron. It would be quieter on the road without a drummer. Nothing ever broke your heart quite like the band calling it quits. Not like there ever really was a band. 

_“Hey! Listen!”_

Jono jolted onto all fours, pushing himself up off the bed and checking every direction for intruders. No one was in the room. What the fuck was that tinny, whiny little—

_“Hey! Listen!”_

His phone lit up across the room with a whir of gold flashing on the screen. Two minutes ago it had been stone dead without a byte of data left to his name. Before it could give another shriek for attention, Jono dragged himself across the room and thumbed open the menu. It didn’t respond. Instead of his usual background, the winged whir of gold circled around his finger and then popped into a wiggling message box that definitely wasn’t system-standard.

**Can baby sleep with you? – W**

It had to be a test. They were waiting for him to do the noble thing and revoke his imaginary claim on the baby. Warlock the judge and jury, laughing behind his back all the while. But noble wasn’t in his repertoire, a 700-page volume of Legal Positivism was the only weapon at hand, and even a stubborn scrapper knew when to tuck tail and run. 

Before he could manage a reply, a beaming little lump of sunshine teleported onto his bed. Leeland had already changed into his jammies and scooped up his rabbit at once, tucking it into the pocket on his belly. He fluffed Jono’s pillow with great enthusiasm.

Jono stood frozen, phone still in his hand. 

_Sleep now?_ Leeland asked with a heavy-eyed smile, like the energizer bunny on his last three minutes of power. _Blue Bee sleep?_

A knock came at the door in short order. On autopilot, Jono drifted over and pulled it open to find Warlock wringing his hands in the hallway.

“Apologies. Self instructed babybeing that Selves wait for permission before intrusive teleportation but he did not appreciate this advice.” 

“It’s…fine.”

Warlock beamed at him, and Jono was beginning to see where Leeland got it. “Repeat query: Can baby sleep with you?”

Jono glanced back over his shoulder to watch as Leeland kicked his feet against the side of the bed, trying in vain to keep himself awake long enough for Jono to make a decision. If he dropped off, they could simply carry him away. It would be easier that way. 

“Why?” Jono finally asked.

Warlock’s head tilted to 3 o’clock. “Because this is where he wishes to be.”

“…One more night can’t hurt.” 

A knowing smile curled the edges of Warlock’s mouth, and Jono shut the door before the alien could voice anything that should very well go unsaid. He couldn’t read thoughts, that much Jono was pretty sure of, yet something in the alien reminded him of a pond skater, skipping from human to human and skimming their surfaces for new morsels of knowledge. React enough, and it would come flitting over to investigate and feed on whatever made you tick. Jono waited long enough that he hoped the alien had left – no footsteps to prove it, but no whisper of shifting sand left in the hallway either. Only then did he turn back to Leeland.

The boy perked up a little when Jono looked his way, desperate to keep his eyes open. His hands flopped sluggishly as he asked, _Music?_

Though the guitar was busted, he’d never really needed that to lull Leeland off to sleep. Jono settled down next to him and helped pull Leeland onto his chest, ear tucked against Jono’s ribs. “You good, rabbit?” He brushed the soft hair back from Leeland’s forehead. “Must be bloody overwhelming. Always had too much mystery in you to begin with.”

Leeland curled his fingers into Jono’s shirt and gave a petulant yank. He knew what was talking and what was Music and this was the wrong one.

With a chuckle, Jono leaned back against his pillow and stared up at the ceiling. “Okay, okay. No opening set. Just the music.” He took a deep breath.

_**So, goodbye**_  
_**Please stay with your own kind**_  
_**And I'll stay with mine**_  
_**There's something against us**_  
_**It's not time**_  
_**It's not time**_  
_**So, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye**_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jono sings The Smiths "Miserable Lie."


End file.
